Watching the political gyrations around gas stoves and the news that China's population declined last year, reminded me of an article I picked up on a recent trip to Maui that is worth dissecting. It was by the main Associated Press climate writer Seth Borenstein, but I won't pin the headline on him since I bet AP headlines are written by a different person — or maybe ChatGPT? The headline reads "Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100". The first five paragraphs boil down to this:
The study in Thursday's journal Science examined all of the globe's 215,000 land-based glaciers – not counting those ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica – in a more comprehensive way than past studies. The world is now on track for a 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which by the year 2100 means losing 32 percent of the world's glacier mass.
That's where things got sticky for me. 32 percent isn't two-thirds. The lead author is a Carnegie-Mellon prof named David Rounce. You have to go down 10 more paragraphs that are mostly about sea-level rise to read:
The Columbia Glacier in Alaska had 216 billion tons of ice in 2015, but with just a few more tenths of a degree warming, Rounce calculated it will be half that size. If there's 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since pre-industrial times, an unlikely worst-case scenario, it will lose two-thirds of its mass, he said.
I always go back to Steven E. Koonin's book Unsettled for a bit of context. He described the four IPCC scenarios of warming called RCPs – Representative Concentration Pathways meant to "span a plausible range of possibilities for population, economy, technology, and so on" (p. 71). They are RCP 2.6, 4.5, 5.0 and 8.5. The last one is the doomsday scenario, but it is falling apart as we speak as you can read here:
“The IPCC concedes what many have contended all along by admitting ‘the likelihood of high emissions scenarios such as RCP8.5 . . . is considered low.’ Indeed, emissions in 2050 in the International Energy Agency’s current and stated policies scenarios are less than half the quantities projected by RCP8.5. The IPCC also tacitly acknowledges RCP8.5 no longer qualifies as a ‘no policy’ scenario since the vast majority of countries have climate policies.
“And yet, IPCC references RCP8.5 (and an equivalent emission scenario called SSP5-8.5) 1,359 times–more often than any other scenario. Maybe that’s why the IPCC declines to assess the ‘feasibility or likelihood’ of ‘individual scenarios’—otherwise RCP8.5 would be banished from the report!
In the news business and in the headline writing business in particular, if it bleeds it leads. We need to be careful about taking an incredibly complex topic and boiling it down to a headline that even the article it heads doesn't think is likely; even if you have to wade through 15 paragraphs to find that out.
When you read in the DJ about R&D building projects on the Burlingame bayfront getting exemptions from the no-gas code perhaps you can now relax a bit
The City Council approved an amendment to its energy reach codes, during its meeting on Wednesday, which allows exemptions for projects planned for the city’s Bayfront before 2023 and considers exceptions for future development.
Or maybe you just wonder about how you get one?
